Soil to Soul by Bonterra Organic Estates

1.2: Elizabeth Whitlow

Episode Summary

In this episode, Executive Director of the Regenerative Organic Alliance Elizabeth Whitlow and host Jess Baum discuss the evolution of regenerative organic certification, the joys of smelling soil, and how regenerative organic agriculture is farming in service of life and transforming the world one farm at a time.

Episode Notes

Soil to Soul: Farming, Food, Wine, and our Collective Future is brought to you by Bonterra Organic Estates, dedicated to exploring diverse voices and perspectives as they relate to farming, food, wine, and the collective future we’re working to build. Soil to Soul is hosted by Jess Baum, Bonterra’s Senior Director of Regenerative Impact.

Today’s guest is Elizabeth Whitlow, the Executive Director of the Regenerative Organic Alliance. Elizabeth’s role at ROA is the culmination of over 20 years working in the field of organic agriculture. She began her career as an advocate for organic coffee growers in Central America. Since then, Elizabeth has worked across the spectrum of elevated certifications, both in farming and ranching, earning high-level placements with organizations such as CCOF and EarthClaims.  

Listen in as Jess and Elizabeth discuss the evolution of regenerative organic certification, the joys of smelling soil, and how regenerative organic agriculture is farming in service of life and transforming the world one farm at a time. In this episode, Elizabeth mentions that we’re nearing one million Regenerative Organic certified acres world-wide, and on August 8, the Regenerative Organic Alliance announced that the one-million acre milestone had been surpassed, a major accomplishment done in less than five years.

Today’s episode mentions Paul Dolan, a leader in the organic wine movement who passed away on June 26. We honor Paul’s contributions to the field, and are grateful for the many ways he touched our lives. 

To learn more about us and what we do, visit bonterra.com. 

In an unaired segment, Elizabeth read Jess a few lines from The Mad Farmer Poems, a book by Wendell Berry. She has always especially loved this line: "I like the world of nature, despite its mortal dangers." 

Episode Transcription

Elizabeth Whitlow:

We choose what we eat, and so we can make these choices really impactful, and we can support a farmer in our own community, and we can support the kind of farming that really resonates with farming and service of life.

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Elizabeth Archer:

You are listening to Soil to Soul: Farming, Food, Wine, and our Collective Future. This podcast is brought to you by Bonterra Organic Estates, dedicated to exploring diverse voices and perspectives as they relate to farming, food, wine, and the collective future we are working to build. Soil to Soul is hosted by Jess Baum, Bonterra's Senior Director of Regenerative Impact. Today's guest is Elizabeth Whitlow, the Executive Director of the Regenerative Organic Alliance.

Elizabeth's role at ROA is the culmination of over 20 years working in the field of Organic agriculture. She began her career as an advocate for organic coffee growers in Central America. Since then, Elizabeth has worked across the spectrum of elevated certifications, both in farming and ranching, earning high level placements with organizations such as CCOF and Earth Claims. Listen in as Jess and Elizabeth discuss the evolution of Regenerative Organic certification, the joys of smelling soil and how regenerative organic agriculture is farming in service of life and transforming the world one farm at a time.

In this episode, Elizabeth mentions that they're nearing one million Regenerative Organic Certified acres worldwide. And on August 8th, the Regenerative Organic Alliance announced that the one-million acre milestone has been surpassed, a major accomplishment done in less than five years. 

Today's episode mentions Paul Dolan, a leader in the organic wine movement who passed away on June 26th. We honor Paul's contributions to the field, and are grateful for the many ways he touched our lives.

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Jess Baum:

Hi Elizabeth, and welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Elizabeth Whitlow:

Good morning, Jessica. It's lovely to be here. Thanks for having me.

Jess Baum:

Thank you so much for taking the time to talk a little bit more about regenerative organic agriculture and Regenerative Organic certification. As you know, I'm a huge fan.

Elizabeth Whitlow:

I do know that. I appreciate, and all of us do, your enthusiasm and just all that you bring to this movement.

Jess Baum:

Thank you. I'm going to jump right in with a super, super simple question that's not simple at all. So the term regenerative agriculture has become a pretty big buzzword with every year that passes. I remember first hearing this term more regularly being used in early 2016 and over the last seven years, conversations have really continued to grow. We see brands making claims around using regenerative agriculture with no real definition or framework to define it. For you, how do you feel this parallels the early days of organic?

Elizabeth Whitlow:

That's a great question and there are a lot of parallels I've heard very recently. It seems to keep coming up probably because of the company I keep. There was the same thing happening in organic where many states had different standards for organic. What was organic in Texas was not the same as what was organic in Arizona or California. And so this was pre-NOP, pre-National Organic program and the organic sector started looking around and going, "Okay, wait a minute. We need to level the playing field," especially considering all the California exports as organic to other states or other countries. And so they wanted to make this consistent level playing field across the board, which is how the government got involved in defining organic.

This is really one of the only industries that asked the government to come in and regulate us more heavily, more stringently because we wanted to have a uniform and unified definition for organic. And it took a lot of work and a lot of different players and it's still, the Organic Food Production Act has a really beautiful definition for organic, but the way it ended up being implemented through the National Organic Program, the federal law allowed some gray areas and some parts that people in the organic sector really disagree with, where there's an allowance for hydroponics and there's not as a strong of a regulation around animal agriculture.

So bottom line, getting the government involved created a uniform standard and definition for organic, but I'm not sure it was what we really wanted and I do fear that that's the direction we may be headed with regenerative, and that's because there's a lot of people claiming regenerative who we have a lot of different definitions for it. Since 2016 when the word first started getting tossed around, there weren't that many people actually saying it, but the last two years has been just explosive in the regenerative sector and there are at least five new certifications for regenerative in the last year have popped up.

Jess Baum:

Elizabeth, how do you define the term Regenerative? We've talked about how there are so many definitions. What is Elizabeth Whitlow's definition?

Elizabeth Whitlow:

Oh, gosh. I'm going to tell you my favorite, very succinct way to define this is coming from our dear friend Paul Dolan, based on a conversation he and I had about Hunter Lovins' book and some of her work, and he came up with this idea that it is farming in service of life. Pretty simple. If we considered every approach to agriculture as that. If it is in service of life, it is something I often say as a type of agriculture that considers all the players in the farm system, all the living beings from the soil microbiome, to the animals, to the workers. More broadly speaking, if you look at a holistic type of agriculture that is very whole farm, whole system approach and regenerates resources, you could expand on it slightly, but I would say farming in service of life pretty much captures it.

Jess Baum:

I love that definition so much and had the honor of hearing Paul Dolan speak recently at Bonterra because of his long history with us, and I was so touched by the simplicity of that definition, but also how complex it is when you really dig into it. Can you tell me a little bit about how Regenerative Organic certification codifies that and ensures and verifies that folks are farming in service of life and how this differs from the broader idea of regenerative agriculture?

Elizabeth Whitlow:

So the broader idea if we look at that of regenerative ag is this holistic systems approach, is appropriate farming in context of that farm's unique place in the geography and the topography and the soil and the cultural practices that happen in that region where that farm is based. The Regenerative Organic certified program, we start first with organic. So that's the key to the door is going to be the baseline of organic, NOP or international equivalent. Then we build from there by layering in additional criteria in three different pillars, and that is the first one is soil health and land management, animal welfare for any commercial livestock operations. And then a social fairness component. Often overlooked is the fact that these humans play a really integral part of any of our farming systems and that we have a lot of areas for improvement as far as the agricultural labor goes.

One other really unique part of the Regenerative Organic certified standard is that we have a buyer's criteria and the buyer's criteria is meant to ensure that any brands that carry forth those marks for the Regenerative Organic certified the logo or the claim, that they are meeting our buyer's criteria. I've been working in certification for most of my career over 23 years now, very many different certification programs, but I haven't seen any that actually have this encoded into the standard where the buyers have to show, "Hey, I'm paying a premium to the farmers." We're supporting the community with a long-term contract. We are doing everything we can as far as capacity building at the farm level in the supply network. So it's really unique.

It's also been challenging to implement, but we're demanding this full, everybody's talking about radical transparency. We actually are like, "Okay, show us the books. Let us see what did you pay for the crop?" And we're looking closely at that and we're doing the traceability audits as well to make sure that there's a lot of integrity in the claim. This is really important in some sectors where we have a lot of incoming growth and that's in particular in cotton, in textiles.

Jess Baum:

When we were looking to codify our commitment to the idea of regenerative agriculture at Bonterra, it made perfect sense and felt like the only way to move forward was for us to become Regenerative Organic certified because to us it is the gold standard. Even beyond that, it's the platinum standard, which is funny because there is the bronze, silver, gold, and perhaps on some level someday there will become a platinum certification. Who knows?

Elizabeth Whitlow:

Gold is really hard. I'm just going to say that right now.

Jess Baum:

Yes. Gold is really hard and we are striving for it right now. And as somebody who works in corporate impact and in these certifications, I have to say that the amount of traceability and transparency demanded by this standard is groundbreaking and is necessary. The social fairness audit requires us to open our payroll, to open our logs of hours work and to open our workforce to anonymous interviews, including our farm labor contractors and that is unheard of in the farming community.

Elizabeth Whitlow:

I think some farmers are like, "What do you mean you want to talk to my workers and you want to talk to my contract providers?" It's been a real learning for all of us, for the farmers, for us, and for the certifiers we work with. And one thing I didn't mention when I was giving the overview of the ROG framework is how we implement this around the world because we are a very global program. We're working with 13, almost 14 approved certification bodies who do the organic audits around the world. So there are five of them in the US and we have I think four operating in Central and South America, and then a couple others that are more global, and so they help in Africa and Asia and some in Europe.

So these certifiers, their auditors are really accustomed to doing technical organic audits and going through the checklist and doing the in-out audit, but they don't necessarily have the training to conduct interviews with a very vulnerable population of people. And these are certainly in the global north, undocumented individuals who perform most of our farm labor. And so it's required more training, more resources, and just bringing the industry up to speed on this, and the farmers as well. We're working on developing basically a handbook or a guideline for farmers and for farm workers so that the farmers know what it looks like to be a really great employer and what kind of systems they should have in place because farmers may not realize things that are happening out there.

They're in a very vulnerable position because they may need that job. They probably really need that job. That's why they're doing. It in some cases where people come up here across the border with coyotes, who arrange their transport in the back of some truck and get them up here and they need to work off the money they owe to the coyote, and the coyote knows who their family is. And so those are things that are really... These affect people's lives, and pesticides do too.

So of course, we're going to talk about organic as the basis of this movement, but when you're talking about the human faces behind this, it's really important to understand the gravity of it. And so we're working very hard on that and learning more and helping our certifiers learn more about this. And this doesn't happen as much with certifiers who operate in the global south because they're already accustomed to conducting a lot of these social audits. That's where the Fair Trade Movement was really born, is in coffee and chocolate where we had very egregious child labor and traffic labor.

So they're more practiced in this, but we've been learning a lot and Fetzer helped us too. You were with us our first year of audits and there were some real challenges there, and we're learning and improving all the time, just like we want our farmers to be doing, right? We're all trying to get better every day and certainly includes us, and we're constantly looking at how we can build a better system, how we can do this work better.

Jess Baum:

And I think as an organization, the Regenerative Organic Alliance has done a great job responding to and changing with the growing certification while still maintaining a really strict and rigorous standard, which is what we as brands and as consumers need because we don't want the standard to get easier to allow for more folks who want to be certified to get certified. We want to keep the bar high and encourage the practices to meet the bar rather than the bar being lowered to meet the practices.

Elizabeth Whitlow:

Yes, and this is the first time in my life that I have ever been like, "God, we've got to lower the standard a little bit or we've got to make this more accessible." Because when I first came on board, our first framework, I don't know if you were familiar with it when it was released in 2017, there was a real outcry from farmers because the first framework was all about no-till, and of course farmers need tillage. So they had to change it from no-till to low till or conservation tillage.

And even that, we have since adjusted after the pilot program. Farmers absolutely need some form of tillage and they're not all able to use a roller crimper, and that model doesn't work everywhere, and there's different contexts all over the planet. So we changed it to a different language, which is really what the goal is, to minimize the soil disturbance so that the soil microbiome can thrive. So that's really what it's all about, and we've since changed the language, and that's a good example of how our standard is more responsive to not just stakeholder feedback, but also science, emergent science and learning from that and knowing that we're not a federal law that might take, I don't know, eight, 10 years to make a change.

Even then, what's happening with the national organic standard around animal welfare. It was implemented by the NOP, but then we had an executive office, Donald Trump, who struck that down, and so we went backwards again. And so still animals are being kept inside and not being able to meet the animal welfare principles. So that's just a good example of how we can be far more responsive and more nimble, and yet we won't let the bar too low. I've got Bronners, Patagonia, Rodale as the founders, and so always answering to these organizations means that the torch will always be held high, and we have amazing people on our subcommittees who weigh in on the standards. They're subject matter experts, farmers, scientists, researchers who know these topics really well, and they weigh in on different questions that we are fielding from our certified entities or incoming applicants.

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Jess Baum:

For so many of us who care so deeply and who felt this existential dread and overwhelm of living in a swiftly changing climate, the idea of regenerative agriculture, and for me, I'll say of Regenerative Organic certified agriculture specifically has really been a life fest of sorts. It's a promise of hope that we can make a difference not just through our systems, but with something as simple, as tangible and as intimate as the foods we choose to eat. Was this something that you always understood, connected to and knew to be true, or was this something you came to slowly or all at once as an awakening of sorts?

Elizabeth Whitlow:

Gosh, well, first off, I'm going to say I do love that expression, metaphor of a life vest and giving us hope in times of true existential crisis. I feel it every day, but yet I'm not letting it get in my way in some ways because I'm just like, it drives me and it helps me jump out of bed every morning and run to do this work. And so I've been living like that for some time, and certainly since I got this job, the honor of my lifetime is to be responsible for this work here at the ROA. And as far as a sudden awakening or knew all along, I didn't know at all. In fact, I grew up in a pretty sheltered suburban environment in the deep south I would say, somewhat in Georgia. I didn't really know anything about food and agriculture.

I came to that after returning from a couple of years in Europe, and that's what really opened my eyes up to the ways of the environmental, the eco soldier, right? I came to agriculture through my environmental sensibilities just as a happen chance. I was filling some time between when I was finishing college and going off to be in the Peace Corps, and I took this internship in the Ozarks and it was a horticultural internship at Food and Renewable Energy or Sustainable Ag and Renewable Energy founded by David Orr. And there is where I really learned about the amazing possibilities of localizing food and local food systems and the power of agriculture to really transform things in such a positive way.

And I quickly abandoned my mission to go and save the world through recycling, and I was like, "Oh my God, agriculture, this feels good. Everybody eats every day." Most of us get to eat two or three times a day, and we get to choose what we eat. So we have tremendous power. Here, certainly in global north countries, we choose what we eat, and so we can make these choices really impactful and we can support a farmer in our own community and we can support the kind of farming that really resonates with what we talked about our earlier as farming and service of life.

Jess Baum:

Myself, I've spent many a Thanksgiving fighting with family members that it's not about the cow, it's about how.

Elizabeth Whitlow:

Right.

Jess Baum:

The regenerative agriculture movement and really Regenerative Organic certified ag specifically, and I feel like it's so important to distinguish between those two. And at Bonterra, we're so careful with how we talk about that because of what we spoke about before, of the lack of definition to what it means to engage in regenerative ag. I think to a lot of brands, to a lot of people, it just means using agriculture to sequester carbon and to your point, it needs to be about so much more. The battle cry of the Regenerative Organic certification movement of the Regenerative Organic Alliance, that is the organization that you lead behind, the rock certification is farm like the world depends on it. What changes when we recognize and name the urgency of the existential threat that faces us?

Elizabeth Whitlow:

It's such a powerful tagline and it really captures people right away, I can tell you. It also, I don't know if you ever saw the van that I drove around the country. Yeah, you saw the van. But then I got the marks on it and it's, "Farm like the world depends on it," emblazoned on the sides, and I swear, people follow me and they pull up next to me and honk and wave and put their thumbs up, and I think it's something we can all get behind and we need to really put behind the division. We need to put behind the attacking and we need to work together and it feels like something like, okay, we can do this together and really approach things in a way that is unifying and not dividing and divisive.

So I think for one, that is a really important plea that I have to put out there is working together to find these solutions and that we can, and we know, and the science is proving again and again that these regenerative practices, regenerative combined with organic practices are incredibly impactful and they help farmers not only retain and build healthy soil, but the farmers are doing better, the plants and the yields and everything, they're doing better.

They're thriving under these systems, and that's what we all want, is thriving future where we can see the possibilities of people living in a healthy community, being able to support farmers in their community and nourishing themselves with food that comes from these regenerative organic farms.

I'd love to just give you a quick summary of where we are today too. The end of last year, I was like, "All right, let's get to a 1,000,000 acres next year." We worked really hard to get to about 500,000 acres. The goal for this year is a 1,000,000 acres and 300 farms around the world, and I'll tell you with us, one farm could represent 5,000 small holder farmers because we work with a lot of operations that are grower groups or co-ops of coffee farmers and cotton farmers and tropical fruits. Our goal was a 1,000,000 acres, and we are already at 850,000 last I checked. We're getting close, and I think we're going to hit a 1,000,000. I'm going to wager that we'll get to that before the end of the second quarter this year, and we actually have over a 100 brands now signed on, licensed to bring product to market.

So the good news for consumers is they're going to start being able to find this brand and our marks out there, and there's more and more places where they can go shopping and buy regenerative, organic certified products that really bring the best of all certifications to bear and bring the best options to market that really align with people's values. So that's pretty exciting and feels really good, and we're just getting started, as you know. There's a long way to grow.

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Jess Baum:

Elizabeth, when, not if, but when you succeed in this beautiful mission that you as Elizabeth Whitlow and the Regenerative Organic Alliance as an organization and the brands and the farmers and the people behind the Regenerative Organic certification, when this group succeeds in transforming the world through this new way of thinking, what does that look like? What does that change? What can I tell my daughter as she's growing up about the changes she can expect to see in this beautiful future you're creating?

Elizabeth Whitlow:

That's a tall order right there. I think that's yet to be known and seen, Jess. It's not that I doubt its existence or that it's possible, but really, we are just getting started, and as Yvon Chouinard says, "Revolutions start from the bottom," and we're just starting, and as we grow and move, this whole shift, this agriculture that we now known as an agriculture that is really about, if you consider 99%, 98% of agriculture in the US is conventional. So that means it's using chemicals and chemicals that are intended to kill things, and that when we flip that upside down, flip it on its head, and we are no longer using all the pesticides and herbicides and fungicides, keep in mind that side term means to kill, and we're no longer farming in a way that is intended to kill things, but rather to support life and build life that we will have healthy, thriving communities, and that's what your daughter can look forward to, to songbirds coming back.

And I've heard this from farmers so often. I can't even tell you that farmers who say when they start incorporating regenerative organic practices, they're seeing songbirds come back to the farm that they haven't seen since their grandparents were farming. And that alone is so beautiful. When you think of recovering species that are on the brink of extinction. We have hope that we can build a system that will provide a beautiful playground for those butterflies and birds to be soaring around in, fluttering around in, and I hope where she can play too.

Jess Baum:

That sounds like a future I would sign up for all day every day. When you talk about farmers seeing with their own eyes songbirds and insects coming back that weren't there before, this is a real measure of biodiversity, right? Because what we know is that above ground biodiversity mirrors below ground biodiversity, and that the soil food web supports a thriving ecosphere and living system that we can see with the naked eye.

The soil health pillar of the Regenerative Organic certification at Bonterra and elsewhere requires that we put our hands in the soil, that we smell it, that we look at it. It's not just sending soil to a lab and having somebody tell us what's happening. It's being awake and alive to what's happening on the farm and having qualitative information that you're tracking over years.

Elizabeth Whitlow:

Yep, exactly. We had some amazing soil scientists on that Soil Health Advisory Committee who came up with those different infield soil testing tips. But my favorite one of all is certainly seeing people crawl around on their hands and knees, counting different numbers and kinds of organisms that they find in and around the soil because it tells you a lot about the system. It tells you a whole lot really about what kind of biodiversity is there and how can that soil and that little can ecosystem support complex food webs? And that's critical for carbon nutrient, water cycling for supporting life, the smelling. And really, some of the scientists wanted to do soil tasting, but others were like, eh. I think it would've been great. We did settle on the smell, and there's a lot you can learn from the smell. Like a sour smell of your soil means that it's maybe waterlogged or there's different kinds of bacteria that love low oxygen conditions to thrive, but if it smells sweet, you know you've got the right amount of organic matter and biological activity happening. So there's a lot you can tell by that, and I would just encourage your listeners here to go check it out on our website.

Jess Baum:

The amazing thing is that this is not soil chemistry, right? This is soil ecology. This is the study of living beings in the soil that is accessible to anyone really.

Elizabeth Whitlow:

Yes.

Jess Baum:

And those resources that you're talking about, anybody can go look at them and go into their own backyard and utilize those methods to assess their own soil ecology. Next time you join us at McNab branch, when you come visit Bonterra, we will have, by that point, infield soil testing kits available for all visitors to go out into the field and experience that.

Elizabeth Whitlow:

Oh my gosh, I can't wait to see what that looks like.

Jess Baum:

It is really cool that these super simple accessible tests are things that the leading experts in the world put their science brains together and said, "Yes, sniff the soil, and by sniffing the soil and using this chart, you can assess what's going on." And I think that's so important because with technology and the complexities of the world, we get so disconnected from the simplicity of our senses and our experiences, and I think that in science, sometimes the quantitative can become the enemy of the qualitative. It's so important to have both, to have numbers and data, but also to be a human with five senses and an experience of the world around you.

Elizabeth Whitlow:

So well said. Yeah, it's all very true, and I think being so reductive as to looking at something, we break it down into these component parts and we miss the whole. Just trying to approach things in a more holistic way in this valuing a holistic system approach and all the life in that system is really what it comes back down to again. The farmers I have met who are engaging in these regenerative organic methods are all drinking the same Kool-Aid. They're all feverish in their excitement of the possibilities and what they've seen on their farm. Their vineyards are thriving, or their farms are thriving when all the farms around them are struggling through these extreme weather conditions that we know climate change is presenting.

And farmers, they're just constantly challenged by the market, by the season, by cycles of drought or flood, and the regenerative organic farms, with all the organic matter in the soil and the healthy soil microbiome, the plants are healthier, and they're just able to withstand these stresses more, and they still come out of it with high yield. It's pretty remarkable how much I hear the same thing wherever I am. It continues to prove to me that not only is this possible, but it's better.

Jess Baum:

I'll never forget Blake Alexander of Alexander Family Farms talking about the livestock on his farm.

Elizabeth Whitlow:

Oh, my God. He was great.

Jess Baum:

Right? And when he talked about the livestock, he wasn't just talking about his cows. He talked about the livestock in the soil and investing in that. I'll say to our listeners, if you have the opportunity to join with regenerative organic farmers and community, it is the most buoyant and beautiful and life-giving thing that you can do.

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Jess Baum:

It's time for quick questions. So Elizabeth, what did you want to be when you grew up?

Elizabeth Whitlow:

I didn't know. I just loved horses. When I went to Europe and learned to speak German and was living there, I came back to the States and thought I was going to be some kind of international business person, and I don't know what that meant.

Jess Baum:

What's your eco confession?

Elizabeth Whitlow:

That van, that beautiful van that I traveled around the country in and my Toyota Tacoma. So I'm selling both soon. I needed them for certain reasons, but I've always driven a Prius or an electric car, and I moved into this other realm of having a truck and a van, and they're on their way out.

Jess Baum:

What is the most impactful thing you've read in the last year?

Elizabeth Whitlow:

I've read a few things. The Water Dancer was so beautiful, and it's so powerful. Ta-Nehisi Coates, this is an incredible story, historical fiction with a lot of mysticism and magic, and this is a really beautiful version of conducting on the Underground Railroad.

Jess Baum:

What place brings you joy?

Elizabeth Whitlow:

Water, water, water. I learned to surf a number of years ago, and so it's the place that I always want to go, somewhere where I'm by the ocean and can be in the water and paddle and be amongst sea creatures and in the beautiful sea.

Jess Baum:

What's your life motto?

Elizabeth Whitlow:

I'm pretty much can do. It's maybe one of those tendencies that can be annoying in friends when they're always trying to solve your problems. So yeah, it's I guess, to be very action oriented.

Jess Baum:

Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today and for everything that you do.

Elizabeth Whitlow:

Thank you, Jess. Thanks for believing in me and being there to help lift and move this movement forward. It takes all of us to do this.

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Elizabeth Archer:

Thank you for listening to the Soil to Soul podcast, hosted by Jess Baum and produced by me, Elizabeth Archer, right here in Mendocino County on behalf of Bonterra Organic Estates, the largest regenerative organic winery in the United States. If you love wine, look for Bonterra's first-ever Regenerative Organic Certified Estate Collection Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay in a store near you. To learn more, visit bonterra.com. Original music composed by Mendocino County musician Julian Sterling. Thanks again to today's guest, Regenerative Organic Alliance Executive Director Elizabeth Whitlow.

If you liked this episode, please rate, review, and share our podcast to help others find it, too. We hope you join us again next week for another compelling conversation about farming, food, wine, and the collective future we're working to build.